When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stormed through Santa Ana, California, in June, panicked calls flooded into the city’s emergency response system.
Recordings of those calls, obtained by ProPublica, captured some of the terror residents felt as they watched masked men ambush people and force them into unmarked cars.
In some cases, the men wore plain clothes and refused to identify themselves.
There was no way to confirm whether they were immigration agents or imposters.
In six of the calls to Santa Ana police, residents described what they were seeing as kidnappings.
“He’s bleeding,” one caller said about a person he saw yanked from a car wash lot and beaten.
“They dumped him into a white van. It doesn’t say ICE.”
One woman’s voice shook as she asked,
“What kind of police go around without license plates?”
And then this from another:
“Should we just run from them?”
During a tense public meeting days later, Mayor Valerie Amezcua and the City Council asked their police chief whether there was anything they could do to rein in the federal agents
— even if only to ban the use of masks.
The answer was a resounding no.
Plus, filing complaints with the Department of Homeland Security was likely to go nowhere
because the office that once handled them had been dismantled.
There was little chance of holding individual agents accountable for alleged abuses because, among other hurdles,
there was no way to reliably learn their identities.
Since then, Amezcua, 58, said she has reluctantly accepted the reality:
There are virtually no limits on what federal agents can do to achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of mass deportations.
Santa Ana has proven to be a template for much larger raids and even more violent arrests in Chicago and elsewhere.
“It’s almost like he tries it out in this county and says, ‘It worked there, so now let me send them there,’” Amezcua said.
Current and former national security officials share the mayor’s concerns.
They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president
as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world’s most repressive regimes.
ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force.
The transformation, the officials say, unfolded rapidly and in plain sight.
Trump’s DHS appointees swiftly dismantled civil rights guardrails,
encouraged agents to wear masks,
threatened groups and state governments that stood in their way,
and then made so many arrests that the influx overwhelmed lawyers trying to defend immigrants taken out of state or out of the country.
And although they are reluctant to predict the future,
the current and former officials worry that this force assembled from federal agents across the country could eventually be turned against any groups the administration labels a threat.
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https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-dhs-ice-secret-police-civil-rights-unaccountable
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